Employee Engagement and Organizational Communication

Posted on February 8, 2023 by anwarsalandy — Leave a comment

Building off the last blog post, I wanted to discuss the flip side of the communication coin, namely expressing information, not simply listening. Indeed, from an organizational standpoint, with communication, it is imperative that the firm convey info both globally and locally. In other words, when communicating, it is critically important that the organization have a strategy or plan that includes messages that are sent across the firm to each employee and messages that are conveyed departmentally within each organizational unit. This ensures that your staff is on the same page and understands what are the most up to date happenings within the organization. In light of the importance of organizational communication and workplace engagement, I have compiled a short list of some best communication practices that your organization can use to engage your staff:

Best Practice #1: Consistently convey or communicate your organization’s mission, vision, and how your staff members can contribute to that mission or vision. In other words you want to answer basic questions for your staff. Questions like: what does your organization do? What is your organization aiming to be or become? Who does your organization serve? What is the significance of the organization’s work? Addressing these basic questions will ensure this is no disconnect among your employees surrounding what your firm does and what your firm is aspiring to become. In other words, you want there to be alignment, cohesion and mutual understanding when it comes to what organization is doing currently and where the firm is headed in the future. Conveying this information during all employee meetings and during departmental meetings is critically important.

Best Practice #2: Consistently inform and explain how employee contributions are crucial to the fulfillment of the organization’s mission or vision. This is important to communicate as people in general have a need to feel that they are contributing in some way to a larger shared goal or mission. Contributing to a larger goal or mission can motivate your staff to work through the various hurdles and setbacks that your employees may face as they work toward the larger mission. In other words, this shared goal or mission can be energizing when the going gets tough. However on the flip side of that, if the vision or mission statement is not clear or uninspiring, your organization will have an uphill battle when trying to motivate your staff.

Best Practice#3: Provide your staff with regular updates and developments affecting their day to day work or the overall direction of the organization. In other words, you don’t want your staff to be in the dark about where the organization is headed or how outside factors are impacting the organization. For example, there may be a new state regulation that impacts the work your organization does. Your staff needs to know this information. Or there may be certain changes your organization decides to make to its technology, this is further information that you’ll need to ensure you share with your staff. Announcements of this sort can be made in all employee meetings, departmental staff meetings, email blasts and organizational newsletters.

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Speaking of engagement: what is your listening strategy, if any???

Posted on January 26, 2023 by anwarsalandy — Leave a comment

It is widely assumed in communication, that it is more important to convey or express information to others, but in reality, an equally important part of communication is listening to or receiving information from others. So from an organizational perspective, the questions become: How are you listening to or receiving information from your staff? How often are you listening? When you listen, is it through departmental staff meetings, company wide surveys, etc.? At what point do you gather this valuable information from your staff? Once you’ve gathered all this data, what do you do with it? How will you communicate the results and your next action steps with your staff?

To address these questions, I’ve put together a short list of best practices that can help you and your organization, ensure you are on the right track and are adequately listening to your people.

According to a Forbes article, a listening strategy is “a deliberately planned and orchestrated approach to obtain relevant insights from or about employees”.

Number 1: Administer an annual employee survey that will help you collect employee sentiment on a variety of important topics and factors. A key thing to keep in mind here with administering an employee survey is ensuring that you select and utilize an assessment tool or survey instrument that is both valid and reliable as you don’t want to base actionable items from a survey that doesn’t really measure what you are trying to measure or is unreliable.

Number 2 : As a byproduct of the first best practice mentioned earlier, it is equally important to only administer the employee survey at specific times. Some organizations administer the employee survey then do a follow up or pulse survey right away. However, caution needs to be taken here as you want to ensure that you have given your organization enough time to report the findings of the initial survey. In other words, you want to give the organization enough time to implement the changes that employees can visibly see and perceive before administering the next employee survey because if your people see you’re requesting more information without taking action on the previous survey, this can discourage future cooperation when asked to complete the next survey. Timing with administering an employee survey is also important as you do not want to administer it right after a mass layoff or when employees get their yearly raises as both occasions may unduly influence survey taker responses and skew your survey results.

Number 3: This is an extension of the last best practice. It’s critically important that your organization follow up and act on the data gleaned from the annual employee survey. Although this one may seem intuitive or commonsensical, it must be said. Indeed, if you want to hear what your employees have to say honestly and are requesting that they take 10- 15 minutes of their time to answer your questions, it is imperative that you act on that data received, one way or the other. In other words, the quickest way to get your survey completion rate to plummet like a hot bag of potatoes next year is to fail to act on previous survey findings. If your staff sees that you fail to act on what they’re telling you, then the mentality becomes “why bother expressing your thoughts and opinions? They’re not listening, they don’t understand or don’t care”. Taking action on your listening strategy shows your people that you value their input and care enough to act on their input. Bottom line, listening without doing anything about what the other is saying, does not work.

Number 4 : With your listening strategy, it is also highly important to communicate the importance of completing the employee survey. This communication needs to come from senior leadership as well as locally led departmental heads such as supervisors and managers. The importance of the employee survey can be expressed in all-employee meetings, smaller departmental staff meetings and corporate email blasts. When communication is sent from management or leadership, your people are more likely to read the message and hopefully take the employee survey. In addition to this, having leadership send the message expressing how important taking the survey is and that employee input is critically needed, can be very influential throughout the organization.

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To be engaged or not engaged… That is the question???

Posted on January 18, 2023 by anwarsalandy — Leave a comment

Questions abound based on this simple yet profound question like is it enough to go to work, punch in and simply collect a paycheck? Does fulfillment and work not go together? Are work and engagement contradictory terms? If they are, do they have to be? Does work have to be mere drudgery or can it be something that one is engaged by? Are there specific actions organizations can take to improve the rate of engagement of its staff members?

Believe it or not, these are questions that keep industrial and organizational psychologists like myself, up at night. Indeed, as helping professionals, we aim to build, create and sustain organizations that are effective, not only for the organization itself, but also for the employees that staff those organizations.

As an individual that recognizes that industrial and organizational psychology has not been given its due attention by the mainstream, one also realizes the need to bring this arcane yet vital field of study out of the shadows of academia and into the mainstream as this field of study explores and examines a major domain of our everyday lives where we spend a significant portion of time, the workplace, in an effort to improve those workplaces.

Dear reader there will be more to come on this important topic…

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Employee Retention 101

Posted on March 6, 2022 by anwarsalandy — Leave a comment

In the Great Resignation era, many organizations find themselves struggling to retain high quality talent as so many people are finding that better work opportunities are somewhere out there in the labor market. According to a survey report from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), over 40% of U.S. workers are actively looking for a new job.  In light of this reality, it has become increasingly important for organizations to implement an employee retention strategy that will keep their people engaged and productive and not walking out the front door. Below are some retention techniques that can be used to retain your people:

Tactic 1: Provide employees with autonomy

Here the idea is to endow your people with the freedom and authority to get their work done. Let’s face it, breathing over a person’s shoulder and micromanaging does not motivate most people. If you provide your people enough freedom and autonomy while also providing adequate support, they will feel empowered to get the job done and satisfy your customers. A practical way to deploy autonomy as a manager is to give your people progressively more important tasks and allowing them to find their way of accomplishing those tasks. This empowers the employee but also provides them with a stretch goal that helps the employee to grow and develop.

Tactic 2: Develop career paths

Speaking of development, it is now becoming more and more important for organizations to provide genuine opportunities for growth and development for their people. Without a clear path toward development, some employees may become disengaged and dissatisfied with their current roles within the organization. To avoid this, it is vitally important to re-examine your current development strategy. Some common questions include: Is your current strategy clear to your staff? Do your people know how they can develop? Is this development strategy incorporated into one on one meetings with supervisors and direct reports? Are training courses offered within the organization that your staff can participate in without a lot of red tape?

Tactic 3: Be Flexible

Here the idea is to give your people the flexibility to work from home or in alternative ways that meet the changing needs of your staff. In light of the pandemic, many organizations have given their people the option to work from home. However, as COVID cases subside, some organizations are offering their employees hybrid work arrangements where they work from home part of the week and then go into the office the other part of the week. Offering this flexibility can give you the competitive advantage your organization needs to stay ahead of the pack. Another way of being flexible can come in the form of giving your people flexible work schedules that help them maintain a sense of work life balance.

Tactic 4: Reward and recognize

When managing your people it’s highly important to reward and recognize them for work that promotes the values of the organization. As the saying goes, don’t be afraid to catch your people doing something good. And when they do something praiseworthy, highlight it in things like your organizational newsletter or company emails so others in the firm can see it.

There you have it, four tips or tactics an organization can use to help retain your talent.

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Workplace Engagement in a Pandemic

Posted on January 13, 2022 by anwarsalandy — Leave a comment

With so many organizations changing the way they do business in light of the pandemic, it has inevitably impacted their employees as well. Many employees are working longer hours from home. Others are on the front line working in our hospitals, restaurants, and retail businesses. The worldwide pandemic otherwise known as Covid-19 or the coronavirus has unequivocally turned upside down the way we live our lives in so many ways. From the way we work to the way we have fun, life is no longer the same since the coronavirus outbreak.

It makes you wonder, how do employees stay engaged with everything going on? A mere cursory look at the statistics tells a bleak story even before the pandemic. According to Gallup, only 35 to 36% of people reported being engaged with their work. These numbers have only gone up slightly since the onset of the pandemic.

However, before we delve too deeply into this topic, let us step back and define what exactly is workplace engagement first.

Work engagement, unlike it antithesis burnout, has been defined as an active, positive work-related state that is characterized by three dimensions, vigor, dedication, and absorption.

Vigor refers to high levels of energy and mental resilience while working.

Dedication refers to being strongly involved in one’s work and experiencing a sense of significance, enthusiasm, and challenge.

Absorption is marked by being completely focused and happily engrossed in work to the point that time passes quickly.

In other words, engaged employees work hard (vigor) are involved (dedicated) and feel happily engrossed (involved) in their work. Indeed, can you imagine going to work feeling both dedicated and involved rather than simply feeling as though you are going through the motions, collecting a paycheck? I CAN. That’s why I am fascinated with workplace engagement research and practice.

Well, now that we have gotten the preliminaries out of the way and have clearly defined what work engagement is, it therefore becomes imperative to now determine the key factors in promoting this state of being in your organizational personnel. Below the reader will find key drivers of workplace engagement:

Driver#1- Developing Social Support

Here the question becomes: Does your organization adequately design its work in such a way that incorporates and encourages opportunities for social support? This is a key question to address as research indicates that job resources such as social support can help to reduce job demands and the associated physiological and psychological costs. It can also stimulate personal growth, learning and development. Social support becomes particularly important or relevant in work environments where workers are confronted with high job demands (e.g. workload, unfavorable physical environment). In these settings, the need to belong becomes ever more important for your staff. Social support aids to this end. Social support from one’s supervisor and one’s co-workers has also been found to be important for engagement. One way to demonstrate social support within your organization is to have supervisors include their subordinates in the decision making process and provide them with positive performance feedback to help them grow and develop within the organization.

Driver#2- Self-efficacy

Workplace Engagement has been found to be correlated with self-efficacy or the belief that one is able to meet the demands they face in a vast array of settings. If you are recruiting individuals that demonstrate self-efficacy, you will find that this personality characteristic or personal resource predicts one’s work engagement as self-efficacious individuals are less likely to view work demands as out of control or unmanageable. Self-efficacy has also been found to be positively related to engagement as it leads to a greater willingness to invest additional energy and effort when finishing a task or project. It has also been found that self-efficacy and work engagement are important for job satisfaction. Self-efficacious individuals adopt stronger beliefs in their capacity to successfully perform work tasks. They are also more likely to establish more challenging goals for themselves, invest more, persist longer and are better in dealing with failing experiences than persons low in self-efficacy. All of these personal attributes are attractive to an organization that seeks to maintain a competitive advantage in the labor marketplace.

Driver#3- Performance feedback

Providing positive performance feedback is also important as it is likely to increase engagement and performance as it encourages employee learning, which can increase one’s sense of job competence. Feeling competent in one’s work is important in that it it can also influence employees to be less inclined to leave their current organization reducing the voluntary turnover rate. Receiving performance feedback shows your staff that the organization is committed or invested in their growth and development. Demonstrating commitment in your employees can likewise influence your staff to be committed to the organization. Therefore, it becomes imperative for organizations to make providing performance feedback to its staff a priority. This can be done by incorporating providing performance feedback into job descriptions of key supervisory or management staff. Once this is incorporated into job descriptions, it will become an integral part of the performance appraisal process whereby supervisory staff will now get rated in part for the amount and level of performance feedback they are providing to their direct reports. In this way, providing performance feedback will not simply be an optional afterthought, but a cornerstone of how one’s job performance is evaluated.

For more information on workplace engagement, please see the hyperlinks below:

https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/277811/1-s2.0-S1877042812X00296/1-s2.0-S1877042812044758/main.pdf?X-Amz-Security-Token=IQoJb3JpZ2luX2VjEDwaCXVzLWVhc3QtMSJHMEUCIQCqhFCdwBRrdFLAyOkps4N6MOfcnCYyayAoKu%2Bgp7wdeQIgLdEYOMAnVsRMWHHbN0BU%2FbuSYl4pobmv3PDGMxGuUdoq%2BgMIVRAEGgwwNTkwMDM1NDY4NjUiDFHCFiosYP1SkBtraSrXA%2BrNZwQdu9l0pUMt%2BMBpUv5v6121dBHuK3BC1OolP2LmDXyG1qujMJ8wHdPg5XQ77cdZVqnCzNTxehO06vgvxt0g9wS%2BTOYTe9SE6bxFvEjN808sqwmQ%2FhdPj5dmE5IQlzjYBNgW12%2Bg0IGBQT4AoMzSfmf5w3q0hxhHeswfdIGxubzI0r3vWFSmeboHAEf%2FUka7EP%2BlqgFUJvR%2BglVTuicX1FdvIbeSU0PPh8TmDZ0eKVOewRpk3RzTIkpuHNeDKwkisAYj1fxsqPG8p0A4EDv0Tf1WneXY25BfO9c4B7skD1IHoeycs2%2F3t3HS%2BpRVg5hpIlwr4SEAp7TnnakDExxMj%2Fd9fOXmjn94EVXENij81E60jVk5ScMFmGNBbfByhNQdhgvmQ%2BwBn4a8fyNN484%2B4jYGyi3Z0Ied%2B%2FeNVFpivKO%2BnxTEQMh2cK9ozwLkZy7UlNQbInXjwr%2F%2FZ7AMRyDQthXb3zvj5PKo14vv6M2d9EASxW%2Fop%2FFK%2FKgXquH%2FXgaIFQkgrhaSromGK3whQB1zYbCUcJCHp11xkRp14eF%2BMBo%2FW45jUl1ShyqOMzqPKLLB3OsjyCBm1RxJa%2FXK8koniRD%2BoHU4Gunr6Mc6DMHgwVvzd3P6zTCAx%2F6OBjqlAc7NA96WVDzOcRUxyQnVwt6LAuTY77qFK1JHbILNZ1AU38dJiA%2BxpKmK7PN%2Fs5%2B9z4x6IkO3avRBjKcTyZt0D3dh40mYihQkMtPPB0KNa2gE6juPgEmDJVWCrLF%2FZqLuX9GnEmNEzVLqWRzRNichVOFUF7dHmaotBGlB0cjJkspbAX8%2F2P1yz%2FSWVbaZbm%2F3X071nZs7%2FCgete1HIm494S7MgM%2Fv7w%3D%3D&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20220113T050832Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-Credential=ASIAQ3PHCVTY3GXNWZAT%2F20220113%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Signature=c0d9355b830826d2e7d0b21c4c31fc835dc0826a3c34a7b625cacc92d2fd3389&hash=b5d578f8ab10872d49473f07ad31b6f9e07876e02f35b3da9faeed953ffe01bb&host=68042c943591013ac2b2430a89b270f6af2c76d8dfd086a07176afe7c76c2c61&pii=S1877042812044758&tid=spdf-23805355-a80e-48d5-a38f-bc49db78b506&sid=339e7d8878d5584b6b7a7fa532e3f9c2ece8gxrqa&type=client
http://repo.uum.edu.my/id/eprint/21220/1/ASS%2011%203%202016%20103%20110.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8160631/

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Returning to work after the pandemic

Posted on October 25, 2021 by anwarsalandy — Leave a comment

With it being nearly two years since the pandemic outbreak radically changed our work worlds, many organizations are now developing plans to bring their employees back to the office in some form or capacity. From hybrid work schedules, where employees are allowed to work from home a few days out of the week and then work at the physical office space the remaining part of the week, to other work arrangements, organizations must be careful in managing this change to ensure a smooth transition for both the worker and the organization itself.

In light of this, Industrial and Organizational Psychologists are just the ones to provide research-based best practices that can guide today’s organization through this time of change. Below you will find a list of best practices to help ensure successful change management:

Best Practice#1

Communicate Communicate Communicate

Here the idea is to ensure that you are communicating the urgent need for organizational change and how this change will impact workers all across the organization. Communicating also involves listening to what workers concerns are. To address this, some organizations hold company-wide meetings where all employees are encouraged to attend and chime in with their comments, questions, thoughts and/or suggestions surrounding the change.

Best Practice# 2

Obtain buy-in or support from influential stakeholders within the organization

With any organizational change, it is imperative to obtain support or buy-in from influential key members of the organization like organizational executives. Like the proverbial domino effect, as you secure this type of support, others within the organization are more likely to cooperate or go along with the change initiative versus fighting or actively resisting it. This is critical with any change initiative an organization is pursuing. In order to obtain support from these key stakeholders, there will be a need to hold ongoing informational question and answer sessions and speaking engagements with various organizational audiences. During these informational question and answer sessions, questions about the change initiative can be encouraged and addressed by supporters of the change. Key statistics and data surrounding the current organizational problem along with reliable research information concerning the benefits of adopting the change initiative should be shared as well. Objections to the change initiative can also be addressed by change ambassadors who attend these informational sessions.

Best Practice#3

Have those key stakeholders demonstrate their commitment to the change initiative

Let’s face it, if you have only have key organizational stakeholders saying they support the change initiative through an organizational press release or announcement, this will not be enough to garner the support or buy-in you will need to have the change initiative implemented and made a reality. To obtain buy-in from others within the organization, influential stakeholders who have bought in to the change initiative will need to engage in ongoing actions that illustrate their commitment to the change. As the saying goes, talk is cheap. Indeed, unless you follow-up and back up your support with visible and tangible actions like setting aside necessary resources dedicated to the change initiative, others may see that the change initiative is not an organizational priority. To demonstrate follow-up support for the change initiative, it is imperative that key organizational stakeholders do their best to honor each phase outlined in the organizational change management plan.

For more information on organizational change best practices, please see the below hyperlinks:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/18479790211016273

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Self Care 101

Posted on May 5, 2021 by anwarsalandy — Leave a comment

In this busy work world where sometimes all we know is to keep doing what well-known songstress, Rihanna said in her popular song, which is to, WORK WORK, WORK, it is still highly important at the same time, to set aside enough time for self-care.

Before delving too deeply into this topic of self-care, let me step back and define exactly what I mean by self-care. Self-care is defined as “a multifaceted and multidimensional process of purposeful engagement in strategies that promote healthy functioning and enhance well-being“. It is this self-care that allows us to forge resilience towards the stressors in our life that we cannot get around.

After reading a Thought Catalogue article, I stumbled across a number of misconceptions surrounding self-care. One such misconception is that self-care is expensive or time consuming. However, in reality, self-care activities do not have to exhaust an extensive amount of your time or resources.

To engage in self-care, all one needs to do is find something that allows them to nurture oneself and take care of things that need they need to take care of. Self-care tactics can range all the way from taking a walk, doing your hair, meditating, listening to music, or simply hanging out with your friends or trusted colleagues. These activities are relatively low-cost and not time-consuming.

So don’t be shy or timid when trying the above self-care activities as they won’t cost you an arm and a leg nor will they consume your entire day. Trust me and the research behind self-care, at the end of the day, you’ll feel better.

Another common myth surrounding self-care is that it is solely about taking salt baths and indulging in things such as chocolate cake. Self-care can certainly include these things for some but it is not reducible to those types of things. Indeed, self-care is not only about nurturing the self in different ways, it is also equally about taking care of the basic things that one needs to deal with and not avoid. Sometimes in today’s busy and hectic world, we can get so overwhelmed by external demands and in the process, neglect some very basic things that we actually need to being addressing. Self-care is about exploring those areas where you have been neglecting things and then taking massive action to address those things so that those issues do not become unmanageable or out of control.

Another myth surrounding self-care is that self-care is strictly for women. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Self-care is for both men and women as both are susceptible to stress due to our living and working conditions. So both men and women alike need to engage in regular self-care to help withstand the stressors of day to day life.  Therefore, there is no need to feel like a girly man simply because you are taking care of yourself. 

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Telework in the midst of the Coronavirus

Posted on May 13, 2020 by anwarsalandy — Leave a comment

telework Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably are already aware that the Coronavirus otherwise known as covid-19, has been rearing it’s ugly head in a number of different ways affecting both small and large businesses alike.

Indeed, with 1.4 million of cases in the US alone, it is no wonder that politicians, small business owners, and everyday people alike, are all making adjustments to their day to day routine to prevent the spread of the virus.

The workplace is not immune to this phenomenon. Many employers are requiring that their workers continue their jobs at home. Even companies that were at one point thinking twice before considering telework are now not only welcoming the idea, but have taken swift measures to make remote work a reality.

Even as companies are offering remote work as an alternative, questions abound: how productive will teleworkers be? Is there any cause for concern? Do feelings of isolation on the part of remote workers arise? What are some best practices that are research based? Well I’m glad you asked.

Below are some tips your organization can employ while many of your staff are forced to work from home:

TIP 1: Set up regular meetings with distant workers and keep them up to date on current issues.

Hear the idea is to make sure there’s enough social interaction among teleworkers as working from home can be socially isolating. Having the opportunity to interact socially with one’s peers or supervisor through instant message or email can replace the social interaction that a worker typically has when they come into the office.

TIP 2: Encourage open dialogue among staff members as sharing and exchanging information is key to the health of any organization.

In a virtual environment, open communication between management and staff members or peer to peer becomes all the more important. This sharing of information can help generate ideas to improve processes and spark innovation. Therefore, from a management standpoint, it is important to invite participation from all staff members during virtual round tables or staff meetings.

TIP 3: Provide technical support to reduce the impact of technology failure as a source of stress.

With this tip, the idea is to remove any unnecessary stressors that can negatively impact your telework staff. In the course of working from home, technical glitches or snafus can arise. If and when they do, it’s important to have a technical support staff in place to give your telework crew the help and assistance they need. Having access to technical support can put your team members at ease even when a technical problem comes up.

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Getting I/O Psychology Out of the Shadows

Posted on July 1, 2019 by anwarsalandy — Leave a comment

After stumbling upon an APA article found through my Twitter feed, I felt the need to post some content related to it as I am a newly minted Industrial and Organizational Psychologist.

The article focused on how the field of Industrial and Organizational Psychology is getting short shrift nowadays as it is not being included in many psychology 101 courses at colleges across the country.

I recognize that I may be biased as an Industrial and Organizational Psychologist, but I must say that when giving an overview of the study of psychology and it’s various perspectives and dimensions, I/O psychology must become a part of the course curriculum and larger discussion.

Indeed, we spend a significant amount of our lives at the workplace and hence it is highly important that we have an understanding of what drives organizational effectiveness, both from an organizational standpoint and from the perspective of employees.

I/O Psychology addresses fundamental workplace questions such as, what tests or assessments can be used to hire, select, and promote individuals within an organization? The field of I/O Psychology also addresses questions regarding training, performance evaluation, job satisfaction, stress reduction, and the like.

As individuals that are for the most part going to enter the workforce as employees, today and tomorrow’s college students will need an understanding of these types of issues and concerns. For instance, if you’re wondering how selection and promotion decisions are to be made in a fair and legal fashion, at the organization you work for, I/O psychology has got some data and information for you.

On top of this, studying I/O Psychology can help students understand best practices for training individuals on work tasks and what factors are considered when workplace policies are designed or created.

What are your thoughts on this issue? Do you think I/O Psychology needs to be incorporated into general psychology courses? Why or why not?

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Mission Accomplished: PhD Edition

Posted on April 9, 2019 by anwarsalandy — Leave a comment

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, drum roll please…. I, Anwar Salandy, now officially hold a PhD in Industrial and Organizational Psychology as you may already be able to tell from the picture taken above.

Yes indeed, after years and years of research and writing, I am now done with my PhD program at Capella University. Believe you me, words can’t describe the sense of euphoria, relief, and excitement I feel all at once, as a result of this accomplishment.

But alas, even as I reflect upon and savor this moment, I recognize there is wisdom in the saying that, “after celebration comes work”. Indeed, after obtaining this degree, I understand that now is not the time to rest on my laurels and become complacent with these prestigious letters by my name. Oh to the contrary, now is the time to put my foot to the plow and do the real-world work of helping others with the gift of education that I have been given.

That is no small task ladies and gents, but just because it isn’t easy, doesn’t mean I shouldn’t go out swinging and do my best. Stay tuned for more details to come…

But while you wait for those details, I want to thank you all for your continued support and bearing with me as I went through my educational journey.

A special thanks or shout out goes out to my mother and father, who taught me in their own ways the importance of never giving up despite setbacks. Another shout out goes out to my brother, who taught me in his own unique way the importance of pursuing truth no matter where it leads you. To my row dog and quasi-brother, I thank you for teaching me that neither the ending nor the beginning of your journey tell you the complete story of who you are, but rather it is what you do during your journey that is most important. To my soul sister, who passed away just before I reached this educational milestone, thank you for teaching me about authentic kindness and being a true friend. To a dear friend that always showed me love and taught me to plan and “just get it done” because “it ain’t that serious”. Your sense of humor and encouragement was much needed, thank you! Lastly, to the one I consider my kindred spirit, thank you for teaching me that if I want to achieve anything worthwhile, things will not come easy, but rather that if I want to achieve something of value, it will only come about through patience, hard work, and dogged determination.

Once again, thank you all!

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